“Do you like it, Daddy?” Hope asked.
“Where’d you learn those moves?” he said, struggling to keep glumness from his tone.
“Mommy teached us them.”
“Taught them to us,” Claire corrected.
“Taught them to us.”
“Yea, Mommy! Yea, Doddy! Yea, me!” Unshy of self-advancement, Charlie hitched his wagon to the chorus as it circled back.
“Talky nana seep, bay-bay, talky nana seep, aw-haw…”
“They’ve been practicing all week.” Over her rims, Claire shot him a look of friendly mischief and jangled the keys like forbidden fruit.
Ignoring them, Ran slipped into the shotgun seat and punched Eject.
“Don’t tell me. You don’t like what Mitchell did.” Her dark eyes looked preemptively fatigued.
His blue ones flashed. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Come on, Ran, it’s sweet.”
“Sweet?”
She stood her ground. “Yes, I think they found a sweetness in it we didn’t see. Why not just give it to them? Did Mitch ever call?”
“No, Mitch never did.”
“How about the check?” Her smirk invited him to schuss past hurt feelings and let other people’s money wax the runners on his sled, but Ransom felt resistance, and though this might have been predicted, his forecasts had unilaterally called for clear blue skies. In New York last night packing up to come, as he moved about the apartment on West Jane, he returned over and over to the kitchen table and over and over slid the royalty check out of the music publisher’s envelope. $17,631.27. No fortune, true, but it had been quite some time since Ran had seen a check that large, quite some time since he’d seen any checks at all. Defying doctor’s orders, he uncorked a celebratory red from better times and poured a glass and put on Tosca, music Claire had turned him on to all those years ago, when he was on the cusp of stardom, yet still, at heart, the same hick kid who’d grown up in a company row house in the shadow of the great twin stacks of Dixie Bag with Mel, a fearful, angry drunk whose happiest hour came after the whistle blew on Friday afternoons. Returning from the package store, Mel ritually climbed behind the wheel and punched the buttons on the Town and Country radio of this car, which sat for years on blocks in the backyard awaiting restoration, as the rain and snow and dust and autumn leaves fell into it. At eleven, with money saved from scrubbing down the urinals at Dixie Bag, Ransom bought his first Chet Atkins self-instruction course and taught himself to Travis-pick, pledging himself to rock like a Famine Irish orphan to the church. When he arrived in New York on a Greyhound six years later, he could lay down, note for note, every lick Keith Richards played on Let It Bleed, yet he lived there for eight years and never set foot in the Met. And it wasn’t that he feared the music—actually, he was curious. What Ransom feared was the moment at the ticket window, when some poised, well-turned-out girl with her hair up and a string of pearls would ask him what he wanted, and he wouldn’t know the proper protocol for ordering, and he’d go hot and red like a specimen pinned beneath her clement 10x gaze. Claire—who’d had every chance, every reason, to be that girl, and wasn’t—had changed all that.
And as Maria Callas sang “Vissi d’arte,” vibrating that silver treble E string in the spine that Ran, in his own way, still reached for every time he picked up his Les Paul, he got a little drunk. More relaxed and closer to himself than he’d felt in months, he turned the check facedown and wrote, “pay to the order of Claire DeLay,” and signed his name. All the way to South Carolina on the plane, he felt it in his wallet, radiating subtle heat, goodness, and he imagined the conversation he and Claire would have, her relief that things, which hadn’t been okay in quite a while, could begin, from here, to be okay again. And now she asked him, “How about the check?” and the old resistance cropped up and surprised him, though it really shouldn’t have. Somehow, in all his fantasy preenactments of this reunion, the one thing Ran had never counted on was the future being like the past.
“Can we talk about it later?”
“Suit yourself.” Claire answered his evasion with no light in her face and put the key in the ignition.
He touched her arm. “Let’s just wait till we get home, okay?”
Her expression came back a little ways in his direction, as far as “mature and fair.” But it had started warm and lost some ground.
“Maybe I will drive….”
She reached for the chrome handle, but Ransom gripped her waist and slid beneath her, switching seats the way they used to do. As they passed, he felt the difference in her body, slighter but more dense, the bone and sinew closer to the surface, smelled her plain good soap, the perfume at the pulse-point under her left ear and, below that, an emergent hint of her BO, like turned black earth. Briefly, in his lap, there was something radiant and almost hot, and some of it was her, some him, and which was which and what was what was past parsing out. But though there wasn’t any stiffness in Claire’s body, there also wasn’t any give.
Rebuffed, he pulled them out into the hot wind and took 17 south. As they crossed the double bridges over the Waccamaw and the Black, Ran saw the voluminous billow hovering over
